Video: Blue Whale Has Been Spotted In The Red Sea For The First Time Ever

For the first time ever, a blue whale has been spotted in the red sea. The world’s largest mammal was discovered by a fisherman off the coast of Eilat, Israel.

A few days later, Egypt’s environmental ministry announced the blue whale was spotted again in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba and was measured at nearly 80 feet long. Monitoring teams have been deployed to track and protect the creatures movements.

The blue whale, which can reach a legnth of almost 100 feet, typically travel alone or in pairs and can be in all the world’s oceans. Even with the ability to live virtually anywhere, the sighting in the warm waters of the Red Sea is rather unusual as Blue Whales typically spend the summer feeding in cold polar waters.

In a post from Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority Facebook and translated from Hebrew by Toi Staff of the Times of Israel, it said, “whales sometimes travel great distances and occasionally increase their range of migration for various reasons: availability of food, damage to other habitats, climate change and other causes.”

One of the authors of the report Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, explained it is so rare to find large mammals in the waters of the Red Sea as it is not hospitable to great whales. Blue whales rely on upwelling’s from deep waters to fertilize phytoplankton and it is very rare to come across large upwelling’s in the Red Sea. “Upwelling’s are rare in the Red Sea,” Notarbartolo di Sciara explains. “This makes it a hard place to live for the great whales, which need big swarms of krill, small crustaceans, to survive.”

Although it may be difficult to have an overabundance of food, the whale appear to be in good shape and should be heading back to where it came from